With Namesys founder Hans Reiser recently arrested as the prime suspect in the disappearance of his estranged wife, a brief thread on the lkml discussed the future of ReiserFS.
According to a report at Linux.com, employees at Namesys are circling their wagons and plan to continue working on the project 'in the short term.' One employee admits, "we are rather shaken and stressed at the moment, although I cannot say we didn't see it coming."

Reiserfs has pretty much been already abandoned by namesys years ago - it has been maintained (and by "manteinance" here I also mean "Adding critical features that distros really need, like ACLs or xattrs for selinux and beagle) mainly by suse, it's reiser 4 what the namesys guys are trying to finish. The title makes me think a completely different thing.

I'm not trying to be funny or anything, but in reading about the things the police found in, and about, his car I couldn't help but think about the analogy of how to properly erase a hard drive.

If he did it, it seems he may have erased evidence too well. The newly missing car seat, the floors which had just been cleaned. Kind of like when the police get a hold of a suspect's hard drive and find that it has been recently scrubbed with some software designed to make data recovery impossible. Of course, if there was blood everywhere, he didn't have much choice.

I've never used ReiserFS, but I hope that something like this wouldn't affect it's use or existence. But they should maybe start considering a name change. Hmm. A new reason why the OS shouldn't be called "Linux": if Linus kills someone, people are going to associate the OS with a murderer. Kidding.

I hate to jump to conclusions, but this one has been pretty obvious all along. It's really damning that he has a past history of violence against his (ex) wife. His erratic behaviour (which I suppose is nothing new, heh) coupled with the RIDICULOUS story about buying those books, the missing seat, blood in a car, all the secrecy, etc.

I won't attempt psychology, but with how Namesys has been doing, and how erratic Hans has always been, it all makes sense. I really do hope he's not guilty, and that it's just more "strangeness" on his part - and I hope they find Nina flew back to Russia and got lost in the airport for some months. I just don't see that as being very likely, and I think it's only a matter of time before Hans slips up (he's already slipped up a LOT.) It's not common to have a murder case with no body, but with Hans' behaviour, I imagine relatively soon he'll spill the beans (IF he is guilty) and even that will be sorted out.

Best wishes to the family and children of the (likely) deceased, and here's to hoping by some strange circumstances, Hans is not guilty and Nina is alive.

I doubt it. Lots of people have all their valuable data stored in ReiserFS, and suddenly it should be pulled out of the kernel because one developer (OK, the lead developer) goes to court? Do you think the masses will accept to lose all their data because it's morally "wrong" to use what a criminal (if he is guilty) has contributed to? And do you think it's morally "right" to punish all these ReiserFS-users for what the developer did? Did you know that Bill Gates has been to prison (ok, it wasn't murder, but you get the point), should we now destroy all windows running computers in the world and blame Gates?

Anyway, IF they should find out that they want to pull it out of the kernel, it wouldn't take long before the distros started adding reiserfs-patches to their kernels.

The good news is that after they slocate the body they should be able to determine the time of death by pulling the mtime. Hopefully there are not too many uncorrectable errors, because I am sure she would have wanted to live and be fsck'd again some day instead of having her location marked as free space for another inode.

I do hope they patch their running processes to prevent her access time from being updated in the morgue.

It is a shame to lose great files as this one, but with the way technology is advancing maybe they could get a DNA bit sample and clone her to a new file system.

Maybe Hans could have RAID'd her instead and we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

... just because it appears that the police have decided to try this case in the press. Why are they trying so hard to convince the public, rather than a judge and jury, that he's guilty? It just makes it harder to seat an impartial jury.

I always like reiserfs and have found the speed to be exceptional, making your distro feel more nippy. What annoys me is that Ubuntu consider it experimental. I don't care if Hans is convicted(for his filesystem sake), I will still use reiserfs because of the benefits i've experienced.

Wow, this really doesn't look good for Hans Reiser. So far all he has in his defense are his allegations about her extramarital affair and some other guy who wanted to ruin Hans's life, and the fact that they have no body. (as linked to in a previous story about this debacle... and probably will be explained in more detail before all this is over).

That said, on the subject of ReiserFS I don't know what to really say. On one hand it's going to be terrible for ReiserFS and NameSys to be associated with a murderer- nothing against any of the people in there, or any of the technology, but there's the natural human tendancy to find patterns in things.
One thing to do (that's been done before to distance people from unpleasant events) is to change the name. After the crash in the Everglades, ValuJet changed their name to AirTran, to distance the restructured company from its past reputation.

To change names NOW, however, would be equivalent to passing judgement on Hans Reiser before his trial. Whether or not he's guilty is a matter for the (admittedly imperfect) justice system in the United States.

Lastly, I don't think people should drop ReiserFS simply for this incident. Are we not allowed to like Wagner because a certain murderous meglomaniac enjoyed his music? Hopefully not. Terrible comparison aside, the same should go for Reiser3 and Reiser4. Remember, they were created by more than just Hans, and the filesystem (hopefully) has nothing to do with his moral, marital and legal problems.

Now, there ARE technical reasons why people don't seem to like Rieser3 or Rieser4; those ARE valid reasons to discontinue using them.

...And I probably just crossed the invisible line of discussion with this...

"Now, there ARE technical reasons why people don't seem to like Rieser3 or Rieser4; those ARE valid reasons to discontinue using them ....And I probably just crossed the invisible line of discussion with this..."

Yep - for me you crossed the line

There are good reasons to dislike every filesystem out there - not just Reiser.
& there are good technical reaosns to say that any filesystem is soo backward it must be killed off.

Were it up to me - Ext3 would go out because it is slower than Reiser ,XFS & JFS in many tests .

But choice for everyone & everyone has different needs .

But I very much agree with the rest you said

BTW to other poster : There was a mention of a filesytem specially for Multimedia in the Linux Symposium papers ( cool suff in there ) as far as I remember - but not Flash .

Does anybody know whether the forward looking Hans and Namesys team has/had ideas to support mostly Flash drive based transactions with the hard disk being relegated to just the huge media files.

I'd wager the only good file systems in the near future will be written with the assumption that it will be mostly Flash based (30GBytes and more as prices fall) for almost all non media files. That would make all the current file systems moot no matter how impressive they are with transactions currently in the 10Ks/sec or so. With Flash based FS, I'd would expect the transaction rates to get much closer to DRAM performance and eventually also the raw transfer rates too with enough improvements in the interfaces. I also expect with a switch to nitride cells away from floating poly, we will see a good reduction in wear out issues.

"""In the same vein, Drokin adds. "The effect on Reiser4 should not be all that bad. [Of] the people who are still working on it, many are very devoted to it and do not plan to drop their work until Reiser4 is actually merged into the vanilla kernel."""